 Hello my friends and welcome to the 95th episode of Patterson in Pursuit. I'm back after a long absence because you know it was really bothering me that Patterson in Pursuit never made it to episode 100, I gotta get into the triple digits. So we're gonna do another 6 episodes at least. And what a better way to start it up again than talk about some of the biggest ideas in the world with a man who's in possession of the highest IQ in America, Mr. Christopher Langen. Not only does he have an IQ somewhere in the 200 range, but he's also got a fascinating story which I highly recommend everybody check out. Chris Langen is a guy thinking about the deepest questions of reality in our relationship to it and he's not an academic, he is in fact working outside of the academy. He's had a bunch of interesting blue collar jobs like being a bouncer, he's currently a rancher and I think he's one of the examples of very highly intelligent individuals being rejected from the Emoner Academy for not having the right psychological characteristics. The academia doesn't just select for things like IQ, it also selects for things like timidity, pacificity, it rewards conformity and groupthink and I think as you'll hear just in our brief conversation, Chris does not embody many of those traits. And nor do I which is why we had a wonderful conversation. So in our talk we covered many subjects. We spent the first maybe 20 minutes or so discussing academia and perhaps our reasons for a more pessimistic view of the modern academy, but then we also have a brief discussion about IQ and we spend the rest of the interview talking about his CTMU which is his own theoretical work called the Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe. It's his attempt at a kind of theory of everything. So in a theory of everything we have been covered a whole range of topics including subjects like what is information, how central is language, are there any paradoxes in the world, can you have experiences that are detached from any kind of conceptual content. We cover interpretations of quantum mechanics and whether people like Einstein and Heisenberg can both be correct just from different perspectives. We have a little discussion at the end about God and ultimate reality. So it was just a light to talk to somebody that has spent some time thinking about these issues and I think you guys are really going to enjoy it. If you want to learn more about Chris I suggest just googling him or checking him out on YouTube. He's got some interesting interviews out there. There's a website which gives a pretty good summarization of some of the ideas called Hology.org that's H-O-L-O-G-Y.org and you can also find him now on Patreon. If you go to patreon.com slash C-T-M-U or I think if you go right now to C-T-M-U.org it will redirect to his Patreon page where you can find more information about his work and you can contribute to his project. I do think the trend of seeing independent intellectuals online on platforms like Patreon is going to continue. It's a very exciting development and we even talk about it a little bit. Alright so I hope you enjoy my conversation with Mr. Christopher Langen, the man who is notable for having an IQ somewhere between 190 and 210 who splits his time between ranching and trying to answer the most fundamental philosophical questions in the universe. Alright Mr. Chris Langen, thanks so much for coming on Patterson in Pursuit. It is a pleasure to be speaking with you today. Well it's very much of a pleasure to be here. You've got a really fascinating story and we've been going back and forth for I was looking at our emails and it was something like almost a year now and I've been I have a lot of anticipation because of all of the people that I've interviewed I have to say it looks like from the outside your story is one of the most unique. So you've got this super high IQ somewhere in the 200 range and most people would assume well here's this here's a super genius he's got to be working at some prestigious university somewhere but in fact you look you look into your story and you're doing blue collar jobs you're at a ranch you've done bouncing you're an independent intellectual who's kind of creating your own philosophy outside the academy and this is an awesome story so I really can't wait to dive into it. Yeah well the academia and I didn't quite hit it off otherwise I probably would be in a university someplace or at least have been in such a place but you know and there are several possible explanations for the the impasse between academia and myself. All right we're gonna start out by analogizing between academia and prison okay well I mean you're kind of incarcerated there you're you're more of an inmate than you are a student these days and and that was true actually when I was in school about 50 years ago and prison inmates have jackets right which are dossiers that record their penal history and kind of precede them throughout the prison system. So we all have these have you ever had a one of your instructors you remember back when you were in kindergarten grade school and so forth they would tell you you know caution young man this is going on your permanent record right okay well your jacket the thing that follows you through the penal system is analogous to your your permanent record in academia and the things that go into your permanent record when you're just a little kid for example if you get into fights in kindergarten that's going to be in your jacket when you get into college I mean these things don't stop they're continuous from the time you start school until the end now my family had a very kind of a tough road to hoe we were usually the poorest people in town you know we didn't have a heck of a lot of food to eat or close to wear anything like that and you know it was kind of rough and tumble so things got on my jacket I mean I was never incarcerated or broke the law or anything like that but you know in school you get into fights and things like this and apparently some of that stuff made it in my jacket and finally when you get enough stuff in your jacket academia just doesn't like you right and this is probably what happened to me in academia is near as I can tell of course you can't get access to your own jacket because this is in a locked room and decisions regarding it are made by some kind of anonymous star chamber but yeah that's as near as I can tell something like what happened to me in academia now from from another perspective you have kind of the some of the administrative nonsense that takes place in academia there's a there's another critique of academia I find very persuasive and I'd like to hear your thoughts which is what do you think of the the actual quality of our present academy so when you look at the ideas that are coming out of the academy do you think to yourself wow this is a bunch of great quality content I sure am missing out being in this illustrious group or are you more skeptical and okay well maybe you know maybe you weren't admitted or you had a bad rap but you really weren't missing out on a bunch of intellectual content no actually I probably made more progress outside of academia than I could have made inside academia is really a political system the quality of instruction these days is executable compared to what it used to be and this is because academia is a growth industry so it's got a big tent it wants to admit everybody it can and in the course of admitting everybody it can it admits people who really shouldn't be in academia then it starts grading on the curve and teaching down to its lowest common denominator and finally the the quality of instruction suffers because of this and this is what has happened in academia also academia is a great place from which to pursue an indoctrination agenda you've got all these captive students there so you can tell them whatever you want to and there is a kind of it's almost a police state sort of mentality where you can say certain things that are politically correct and other things you can't say and academics despite the fact that many of them are very gifted people and do have good ideas find themselves locked into certain orthodoxies that more or less constrain their thought right and really they're a little bit constipated you know they're afraid to say the wrong thing you know because some other powerful academic might see it and take revenge upon them or something like that so they're they're all like frightened little mice and of course the administrative level of academia has been expanding it's just really been metastasizing all over the place until now most of the money that comes into academia is paid to these quasi corporate executive types that run the administrations and and faculty members are at the mercy of these people so academia has definitely suffered over the last half century so especially because you know perhaps since since the great society came about johnson's great society and people started teaching down to the most common denominator in these schools you know no child left behind etc etc basically you know it's no no no poor child no other privileged child left behind and we'll just take any geniuses that happen to fall by the wayside as collateral damage right this is a really interesting area of research just in the past few years if it's the case that the quality of ideas coming out of academia is very low there's an interesting sociological question why is that the case what happened and so this is this is an area I'm researching and I found that politics both governmental and non-governmental actually have just a gigantic impact in terms of not only the quality of research that comes out of the academy but even the the topics and the the paradigms through which individual academics do their research it's like one of the areas I'm researching now is the history of quantum mechanics because I think there's quite a lot of poor quality ideas that people appeal to various interpretations of quantum mechanics to justify and so I looked into the history and it's shocking the actual history of the development of some of the ideas of quantum mechanics are I would say a scandal like there was a there was a professor David Bohm who had some alternative interpretations from the orthodox interpretation I mean and he also had some political beliefs like he was a communist and so I guess for decades if you were sympathetic to Bohmian mechanics people thought oh well you might be a secret commie so there was a actually Bohm is fairly popular these days I mean he's these days yes yeah yeah but you know it you realize that Bohmian quantum mechanics is dualistic yes I'm actually partial to the to the dualism but I just found it an interesting sociological phenomena that something like you know a a physicist political beliefs could then kind of corrupt the work that was taking place in physics just because people didn't want to be associated with somebody that was potentially communist for multiple decades I think you had to move to Brazil or something like that to continue his work down there it's shocking to see that kind of thing from the outside yes it certainly is but that's the way it works it's one giant self-reinforcing system basically it's run by people with money and if people with money want certain questions to be answered in certain ways then they make sure that nobody advances in academia who does not parrot the party line and say what he's expected to say so this kind of self-reinforcement is antithetical to intellectual freedom and creativity so what kind of response have you had from people within the academy so even if you were blacklisted before surely I mean you're you know you haven't a name to yourself have people taken your idea seriously do they say hey Chris this is really interesting you know let's talk about it or is it just complete dismissal you know you're kind of a you're a pariah well there's the pariah aspect here's another aspect I came up with the CTM you about 30 years ago and a lot of the people and of course I've talked about it all that time and certain ideas that I put into the zeitgeist are now coming around and you know people are talking about them the last thing they want to hear is that oh wait a minute somebody came up with all this stuff 30 years ago you mean I'm not original you know I'm not initiating this somehow and so some of them ignore me not just because I'm a pariah and I'm saying things the content of which they don't like they're saying things because they don't like my very existence the fact that somebody could be there 30 years ago saying these things and that they went ahead and behaved as though he never existed and said things that are redundant essentially they're not as original as they thought they were and I find that this is a problem that occurs now when I am dialoguing with academics do you have active correspondence with academics or is it you reaching out to them and that you know they don't they're not really they don't want to entertain serious conversation no I published three academic papers in the last couple of years and I'm gonna some groups that actually are quite they're on the very cutting edge of the theory of quantum consciousness and quantum mechanics in general and quantum interpretation so I'm right there I'm talking to Nobel Prize winners in the field and you feel like they're actually maybe privately more open to having some of these conversations then then perhaps what they could do professionally or publicly yes absolutely for instance there's no one who will argue with me now that they've seen me in action for two or three years I have very little opposition from any of them they just believe what I say because it'll almost always turns out to be right but they can't go back into the into their cloistered academic environments and speak on my behalf without still you know encountering a certain amount of resistance and most of them unfortunately are too timid to take that risk so in other words I get the respect of individual academics but they're not willing to back me up right yeah I had a fascinating conversation with Brian Kaplan who's a professor at George Mason University and he wrote a book I think it was called the case against education which more of a provocative title than it was a product of book but he made some interesting points that I hadn't thought about that the Academy doesn't just select for intellectual prowess it also selects for literal psychological characteristics and I think timidity is one of those characteristics that even if you're you know highly intelligent you know you're producing a lot of great content if you aren't I should say have a spy to be compliant yes right if you have a spine and are willing to stand up and defend and attack when necessary it seems like the general academic will just shy away and you kind of you're automatically disqualified just kind of on on psychological grounds well correct basically academics never want to say that any one person is right because in so doing they're saying that a number of other people are wrong and it's not politically correct you can't accuse anybody of being wrong these days in academia right almost as though as though the concept of truth has totally gone by the wayside right academia you know as though truth is a relative concept so that's not the case it never has been or never will be I completely agree I remember specifically that so that idea has both philosophical and practical fun I agree that I think the idea of truth objective truth has been lost with our with our current academic system but I do want to ask you so you're you've decided to continue your intellectual pursuits then outside the academy and or maybe maybe doing some more work now at Wittgenstein I resolved to go the hard way right so how just practically speaking like day-to-day how do you usually spend your days I know you've got a ranch but what how much time do you spend that's just dedicated to reading and writing and thinking versus doing more practical things well you know I get up in the morning and I usually try to work on on my theory and then I go out and do whatever chores are necessary on the ranch and I try to check into our forums mega foundation forums also running non-profit foundation aiming to optimize the intellectual resources of mankind that's called the mega foundation so I see to that business and then I get back in whatever way I can to my work most of which consists of the CTM you sometimes I take a little break for relaxation my wife and I have been looking at a few TV programs recently amazing amount of sheer propaganda in in coming out of Hollywood these days but that's that's pretty much it I spent as much time as I can on the CTM you know I'm kind of monomaniacal in that respect so you said you're working you have started the non-profit mega foundation is that you don't have to go into details here but is that how is it that you have how do you raise funds for that is there are like a group of people that contacts you and they they pledge money to it or is this something like how are you able to finance something like that well we've been financing it out of our own pocket for years recently we discovered patreon and I got a patreon page there sometimes people make donations of their own free will not too many but but there are people who do that so now it's turning into something previously that my wife and I had to pay for out of our own pockets because something that people are actually helping with and that's a very good sign in the introduction to this episode I'll make sure to mention and link people to your patreon page I've got one as well I think it's a really exciting development actually for independent intellectuals and I wonder what your your thoughts are in terms of optimism for the future do you see like I'm kind of jaded I'm rather jaded about the academic system and I think I think we're going to see a lot more independent intellectualism online in the future that might just be my my jaded perspective yeah well this is what I was saying 30 years ago unfortunately I was a bit ahead of my time as I usually am so I got nothing but resistance and nothing but what are you talking about it's a you know academia is wonderful look at this is the vanguard of intellectual progress is protecting all of our past knowledge it's wonderful and of course none of that is really true anymore but you know I started seeing where we're in danger here in academia is deteriorating and nobody wanted to listen now they're all coming out of the woodwork so do you think then that in terms of serious intellectual production that we're going to start seeing more people just go the independent route yes absolutely you've got a number of websites like what is it research gate and academia dot edu and a number of these other places where where people can publish their research papers without having to go through academia or the the filtering process associated with academic journals right right which are usually controlled by complete yes people you know who are just doing what they're told yeah yeah and I've argued with many academics on this they tend to attack they have attacked me at least more in the past now than I have recently but when defending the merits of the academy they don't say oh well you know there's an education you get inside the academy that you can't get on your own it's like okay well how to bend over and pay a lot of money for it yeah well yes exactly right can you specify exactly what are the ideas like it's book recommendations it's discussions I can have all of those things by myself like I don't need to pay $50,000 to have book recommendations and precisely as the PhDs pretty some precisely most most of what is valuable in academia eventually comes out in book form and oftentimes those books are written more clearly than what you would get in a lecture in the university let's face a lot of these a lot of these college instructors are not really all that talented when it comes to actually teaching you know they just hand you your notes they hand you the textbook and aside from that you're pretty much on your own well if you're pretty much on your own what are you paying 50 grand a year for exactly you know why so this is the problem that I think academia is now facing and it's really a kind of a watershed moment and they're going to have to decide whether they want to teach and educate or make a lot of money as though they're a big metacorporation so last question on that on the topic of academia this I think is a legitimate criticism of going the independent intellectual route though I think there's ways there's good answers to this question but how do you then see a kind of system of collaboration emerging from independent intellectuals because the term that gets thrown around is peer review oh you have to have the peer review of the academics I think peer review in theory is a brilliant idea I think peer review in practice as practiced by the modern Academy is terrible if people are incompetent in the in the Academy you don't need a bunch of incompetent peers reviewing your work but there is some value like inherent value to the idea of having other competent people actually review and give feedback and try to sharpen one another's ideas so how do you see that emerging online you think there's gonna be a like a formal system or a more informal system perhaps have serious people review one another's work well it's already pretty chaotic out there there are already all kinds of papers and ideas being published that are totally off the map you know there are a lot of people who are completely off the reservation and and what they're writing and talking about sometimes is very valuable but the lack of peer review the lack of subjecting it to the judgments of other people it shows after a while you know certain things are being missed certain things are being glossed over that are actually important and certain outright stakes are sometimes being made so yes peer review if it were conducted properly would be a very valuable thing but it is not being conducted properly anymore it has become once again a part of this self-reinforcing system I was talking about basically the the the peers who are reviewing submissions to journals are parroting the party line and if you depart from orthodoxy in any way oftentimes they're just gonna circular file your paper and this is not something that that is worth putting up with so the downside is at least as great as the upside is these days and that's unfortunately not a good place for us to be do you see that turning around in the future that you could have alternative like semi formal systems come up for people to review one of another's work I saw I saw this you know 30 years ago I mean I tried to collaborate with with MIT I wrote I wrote papers all you know I wrote letters to all kinds of people who I wanted to collaborate in such an effort and they were just you know like so what you know it's it was like no we've got a perfectly you know functioning system here academia incorporated and we're just going to stick with what we have but of course now people are coming out and talking about the same things I was talking about 30 years ago and yes it could work but you've got to put the right people in charge because the people who are going to try to run such a system are going to be people who are naturally biased in favor of their own ideas and their own opinions so then they will simply recapitulate the kind of bias and prejudice that we see in academia today so one more thing I want to ask you about is IQ itself I think in our culture there's a people put a lot of value on IQ and they think there is like a one-to-one correspondence with IQ points and actual real intelligence I would disagree you disagree with the I would disagree with that immediately IQ does nothing but get other people's backs up and now they start actually becoming oppositional toward you because they have been taught that IQ is a complete fraud that has been perpetrated on people in violation of every known standard of social justice oh I see that's what IQ is today I think there's been I think that it's a backlash that we're experiencing I think it's I think it's split into they're definitely among the the social justice types I you're right I do definitely see that where well they they pretend it's just an entirely fictitious metric well yes just keep in mind that academia consists of these social justice lawyers find many people in academia who will actually stand up and say something that you can hear in favor of IQ these days even though IQ is still heavily employed within academia itself in order to rank students and direct students and put people certain people on certain tracks okay that is I think that is a fair point however but so I think what I'm doing is I'm kind of a dismissing a lot of the the more justice oriented criticisms of IQ and I want I want to actually focus on the concept itself because I do think it can be overblown in terms of its merit that it I've spoken with plenty of high IQ people who are foolish who just have actual bad processes of reasoning I tend to think IQ correlates with intelligence but is not the same thing as intelligence it's just a particular measure you know with with certain kinds of items on certain kinds of tests you know that certain people take and and yes that that's that's all it is but if the question is does IQ correlate with intelligence and with real-world success there is no doubt about it right I think the course it does and therefore it is a valid construct yes I think that IQ it can be understood as a as kind of intellectual horsepower or mental horsepower and and if that is what it correlates to his mental horsepower then it's no surprise that it would correlate with success in the world but that's it would it would correlate with mental horsepower but in fact there is a there's a directional component as well if you're going to talk about a vector and you want to talk about impetus or the length of the vector you're also going to have to talk about the direction in which it is pointed when you said that some high IQ people just seem downright foolish in some respects means they have trouble pointing that vector the vector is very long it's got a big impulse associated with it but they don't quite know where to point it that's the problem with IQ because that directional aspect is missing from it I think that's a good point I've also heard stories I don't know if you can confirm this or not but I've also heard stories of people that are practicing for IQ test like at the at the upper end of the IQ spectrum I remember hearing I forget what the gentleman's name was there was there's a one of the prominent people who's way up there you know 180s or whatever an IQ is known for you know spending hours and hours and hours practicing to try to improve his score and if that's the case if you can actually do that I think I know who you're talking about yeah I think it kind of undercuts the the metric of IQ itself if you can actually improve it over time just by practice that is that is correct to totally undercuts it if you can actually improve your your IQ scores by just spending more time alright but on the other hand it doesn't necessarily that it may be a a a legitimate factor of intelligence the motivation to spend more time solving problems definitely works into until I mean the people that have solved the great problems in in in the history of human intellectual progress have been people that were highly motivated to spend a lot of time working on those problems so yes their intelligence did have something to do with motivation so yeah we're in a very we're in a difficult area we actually have to define intelligence in such a way that it is invariant with respect to this kind of thing right alright so the next thing I want to talk to you about is your cognitive theoretic model of the universe very intrigued by this because I think the you know the ultimate goal of philosophy is to have the theory of everything or the biggest picture context for understanding everything and it's an ambitious goal and I think it's wonderful if for anybody that actually tries to do it I think it's wonderful and I want to I kind of want to dive into it and just see what I can learn both myself selfishly and I'm sure my listeners will find it interesting as well okay so first can you give a general summary of I guess the questions you're trying to answer with the CTM what are the general questions you're trying to answer and then what's the what's the summarized version of your answers for those questions well of course I'm sure you know what philosophy is it's a by definition it's a single overarching discipline that spans all branches of philosophical inquiry right and as philosophy progresses this meaning is simply extended and integrated until finally what you're supposed to get is a system or unified language the discipline of philosophy is supposed to become an actual foundational language for for all the branches of philosophy right and by foundational we mean comprehensive and fundamental okay that language is called the CTM you it's the foundational language for everything else it's the philosophy and other people I suppose would call it a TOE or theory of everything but that term has been irrigated by the physics community to to describe the unified field theories and other constructs similar constructs but it actually goes much further than that the physics of the the well foundational physics the foundations of physics is not really a very solid discipline unfortunately at this point and for that philosophy will be required enter the CTM you that's what the CTM you're supposed to provide it's supposed to be the bridge between philosophy and hard science mathematics and all the rest of it's and as such it has to be formulated on the metaphysical level right because you know what metaphysics is metaphysics is technically the the study of ultimate reality it's it's designed to answer the question what is reality ultimately or really is such it has to involve on ontology and epistemology right ontology and epistemology are coupled in the CTM you know in a in a particular way and the CTM you takes the form because of that coupling it takes the form of something called an intrinsic language which is really a completely self referential language that is coupled with its own manifold so that the universe of the language is included in the language itself and in addition the model or the mapping between the theory and the universe is also included in the theory and that makes the theory something called tri-alloc if you talk about if you want to do you know who Pierce is Charles Sanders Pierce yes they came up with this idea of tri-addicity in reality you had signs basically he's got a semi-ontology in which you've got signs that represent objects and then they turn into interprets right in other words things that are actually mental images of whatever it is that the sign represents this is this property of tri-addicity in the CTM you becomes tri-ality and that is what I just explained it's a language that is at once its own universe and its own model so can I kind of try to rephrase that in my own language and then you can correct me if I get this incorrect go ahead so in the pursuit of trying to develop the most broad philosophy not only do you have to describe what the objects are that exist you also have to give explanation for the description of the objects themselves that's be kind of self-inclusive in that manner so you have to have both like a an ontological claim about what models are and you have to have the actual models themselves it's got to kind of all be wrapped up in one one piece right very good and to formulate it we were talking about Pierce earlier if you were going to formulate it in terms of his semiotic ontology which is not by the way that's a very that was a very movable thing that he had I mean he kept on trying to nail it down but he never quite succeeded but if one were to say that that reality is a sign that is that represents itself and that gives rise to an interpret it which is then goes back goes back and becomes another sign which is then converted into an interpret and so on in a in a cyclical fashion that's the kind of ontology we're talking about with the CTMU with this trialloc theory that we have now Pierce wasn't involved at all in in my original conceptualization of the CTMU because I hadn't heard of my introduction to logic came to Frig or Russell Goodell all the usual people that that that people of my generation were were originally taught the formalisms of Pierce somebody who has become popular only recently it's been repopularized you know he was back in the 19th century is when he was a member of in good standing of academia he was later to be I think exiled from the campuses of of Harvard and maybe John Hopkins as well which is where he went afterward but they didn't much care for him back in his own day and he kind of died neglected and in poverty but now he's become fashionable again and the reason he has become fashionable is because his ideas resemble or were precursors are kind of foreshadowed the CTMU CTMU has this property of triality which is a much more refined concept than Pierce's try to city. Okay so let me try to start with maybe some observations and then you can kind of bring the observations into your into your explanation of them into your theory to explain them so fishing expedition yes so I like to start investigations into metaphysics with what I think to be are kind of the most concrete things the most concrete objects out there which is our experiences like I seem to have this direct connection with sensory experiences like I see some green in my visual field and some red in my visual field and I go okay of all the things that exist out there there are at least these patches of colors that's got to be some thing and then and that's some type of experience but then I think about the meditate if you will on the nature of my experiencing those colors I think well there's also this other thing which is like my concept of the experience not only do I have the actual experience of the color red but I seem to have this other thing which is a concept of the experience of the color red and already for me kind of split reality into two parts got the experiential you've got the conceptual and then the more I invest again I'm thinking oh there's three dimensionality of space like there also seems to be a physical out there there's a physical objects that occupy space and so in my kind of intuitive metaphysics is very pluralistic seems like there's lots of different types of things so do you have the same observation and do you do you say okay that's okay there there is a plurality of things or do you try to unify them all together ultimately reducible to kind of the same fundamental reality well they have to be reducible to the same fundamental reality otherwise they're not a part of the same fundamental reality and we like to think of reality as being something that's coherent and unary in a metaphysics in general seeks to answer the question of what ultimate reality actually is the answer to virtually every other question of philosophy and science depends on the answer to that question right so what should do is you start out with you say you look outside yourself at the external universe and you see objects display certain patterns certain groups of colors and so forth well the groups of patterns of course are formal they're of a formal nature in the sense of platonic form and and then you have instances physical instances external to yourself of those patterns alright obviously the two are coupled or related the CTMU takes those things couples them and then seeks the the basic fundamental model of how those what those things are and how they get coupled and in so doing it comes up with an identity something that distributes over everything in reality and then it quantizes reality in terms of that identity so that everything stays homogeneous and coherent and unified so your unification of these two things can you put some some concrete explanation like are the things that exist are they themselves colored when you what they are you have certain syntactic categories in your head in the sense of Kant and what you were saying are instances or values of those in other words the values are related to a coordinate system which you impose on your external universe and you're really talking about duality there you're talking about the patterns that in terms of which you see the external universe and you're talking about then the instances in terms of which you can see the patterns so that's the coupling and you're doing the coupling you are an irreducible entity in your own right in your ability to do that coupling so that's what the CTMU is it deals with irreducible entities like us so and but I was reading through the CTMU it has this very central role of language in in reality that that yes as a mathematical structure yes so there's this really I don't know which article I was reading with you've written several pieces of course on CTMU and I don't remember which one this came from but you were saying that language is a type of mathematics which I that was really interesting because in my I'm trying to build out my own particular philosophical system and I like to say that mathematics is a type of language so I kind of see you know language as in there you have a duality yes I am stuck in a dual I'm stuck in actually a pluralism and I'm interested in trying to unify all these things into one you're not stuck in a pluralism okay that there's dualism of course is just binary pluralism but then you know you've got something called duality in pluralism you've got one thing here and one thing there with a void between them whereas in a duality you've got two things in coincidence in one and the same underlying thing so it's entirely different we're talking about a true dualities two things that are in coincidence whereas dualism and pluralism are talking about I see things separate things that are disjoint in some kind of space of okay so how when you're looking at a when you're conceiving of a duality then how do you know it's duality and not two separate things how do you know they're unified because they're syndifionically related basically you cannot simultaneously see two discernible things unless you are distributing your cognitive syntax over them the cognitive syntax is what you're using to connect the two of them and behold them at the same at one in the same time even while you're discerning all right if you didn't if nothing in common distributed over them then they wouldn't be in the same space and you wouldn't be able to apprehend themselves okay can I put I'm gonna try to put this in my own language and then correct me because I actually made a little video on this currently esoteric idea that I haven't heard anybody else talk about but I wonder if it's related here where I say something like I think in order to get a plurality of actual if you have a multiplicity of objects I think it presupposes something like mine I think yes it does yeah so that this is interesting I haven't really heard anybody else say that that if you an object in itself it's if it's to be held in relation to something else it kind of presupposes some glue between those things and I think that glue is mental which is totally bizarre yes it's syndiphonic relational structure which has been around for 30 years and I don't expect you to have heard of it because it hasn't been you know that well publicized because of the nature of academia but believe me the concept is there you're distributing your own mind or cognitive syntax over everything you perceive okay so would it be fair to say could I put it this way then that within the mind so it's I've got this I've got a cup in front of me here and I have like the left side of the cup and the right side of the cup so to the extended that there is what appears to be one object with two ends really there's a there's a mind unifying two parts of a of a of one thing so there is there's only one object here but in fact there's two parts to it rather than saying there are two completely fundamentally separate things which is the left side of the cup and the right side of the cup well that means that you can break it into two parts if you want to okay you can take it and cut it and you can end up with the left part in the right heart part it's a genus to topology and basically you can just cut off the part with the handle and then distinguish that from the other part okay so so this this kind of gets us into myriology that the study of parts and their relation to holes and this is another area which I'm I'm I'm kind of confused in the sense that regardless of of what the myriology I'm entertaining I find a bunch of unsatisfactory conclusions so there are some if we're talking about let's talk about just sets like a normal set about like a set of rocks we've got five rocks in front of me so there's one theory in which you know there are there are five individually existent rocks and then a mind come along comes along and says ah and I'm going to unify them into you know a bag of rocks or a set of rocks well that's just one way of looking at it right so this is something I'm rather partial to I think okay what the set itself actually is is a is a mental construction versus the set being something that exists separate of our conceiving of it and like out there in the right which means that you didn't just come along and find these objects you somehow participate in their existence you somehow are a reason that they exist I mean if the reason they if if basically they exist by virtue of the fact that you can mentally apprehend them then that has something to do with their existence they do not exist independently of you so they don't just come along you don't just you know you don't just bumble through the external universe and bump into them somehow you you're you're implicated in their existence that's another way of looking at it is that part of the it would you say that's the the the the myriology of the ctmu is that way of thinking about it you better days you've got one unified identity but it is self dual consistent both mental and physical aspects they're unified from the top down all right you don't just bumble through an independently existing external reality and bump into stuff that's not the way reality works basically reactor reality self distributes and self differentiates from the top down okay okay so here's a quite this this is really interesting because this sounds a lot like it almost sounds like idealism but I wonder in in observing the parentness of like the differentiation of things there seems you know it seems like there's multiple rocks out there that I bump into so the question if that's if that's illusory why why do you know that's that's not illusory I didn't say anything about illusions well so you're saying that it's not the case that there are just rocks out there that we bump into right there it's the it is however the case that there are rocks out there you don't just bump into them however okay so why in some sense in some sense they coincide with the mental patterns in terms of which you apprehend them so do you have an explanation for why it appears to be the case that well I guess here's a is a funny way of putting it why is this not self evident is this something that can be something yeah so is this something that you think upon investigation can be like you can be logically certain of it must be the case that this is the way reality is or is or is it more open to being wrong with it like is this an a priori there is no possibility that the ctmu is wrong I've been telling people this for years and no one has ever ever come up with a reason why this should not be the case would you say that it would entail like a logical contradiction if it were false exactly the ctmu was formulated as something that was called a super tautology tautology is our things the logical version of tautology anywhere things that are inviolable you can't get out of them the ctmu is one of those things but formulated on the ontological or metaphysical level of discourse actually I wrote a little just a small little book on on metaphysics and logic it's called square one the foundations of of knowledge and I have a bit on tautology and a lot of tautology is irrelevant I think tautology is like the most important things to discover in all of philosophy precisely and it's a little bit tricky formulating an ontological tautology okay that's what the ctmu is it is in this structure is called a super tautology and it takes the form of a mathematical construct called an intrinsic language okay and this is all explained in the papers I don't know if it's very well explicated there so yeah that is that the only I would say in the little book that I wrote I have like a sentence trying to get at a tautology in metaphysics and all I could come up with is something like it must be the case that the mind exists it could not be the case that there are no such thing as experiences taking place like that's about as far as I could get well that's pretty much true it's tautologically true because it's happening to you right now right deny it and you're negating your own existence exactly which which one can pretend to do but one can't actually do that's correct a lot of people are very much into that pretense by the way but it's totally irrational I agree okay so another another concept I want to hear you explain is information so you know it's fashionable to talk about information theory at present people think that ah this is there's a lot of answers to metaphysical questions come from information so for you in the way in the CTMU first of all what is information and then how central of a role does it play in your metaphysical theory well it plays a very central role information is attribution or communication right it's it's you start with a potential and then you narrow that down to a sub region of that potential in other words you're creating an instance of the original potential and that is just an attribution it's akin to when you apply a quality or a property to an object right which actually occurs from the top down in the CTMU but we'll just set that aside for now that information is thus a mapping it has to be understood as something that is a partite you've got a source of the mapping then you've got a target of the mapping and then you've got the mapping between one and the other which spans both of them alright that's CTMU tryality once again now what is the vehicle of information the vehicle of information is uniformly always language alright that's the mathematical structure that is that in terms of which information is always defined so that's why in order to be information in order to be regarded as information language language has to be the structure of reality so there's a lot of stuff that you've never heard before but it's like I say it's been there for 30 years so when you say language is kind of the fundamental structure of reality would you say that language from a certain perspective is colored red in some circumstances language from a certain perspective is colored red yes so for example when I'm when I'm observing the objects if actually fundamentally what I'm observing is language then there has to be some redness to language like what if it's the case that language is not red then what is the actual thing that I'm looking at well in the CTMU you would say that red is a component of perceptual syntax and that you are imposing that property red as a component of your mental syntax on whatever it is that you are considering in this case language so yeah basically if you want to if you want to if you replace red with syntax as a whole then what you just said was valid and tautological but it's syntax makes it seem like it's kind of a conceptual thing I'm talking about like the actual phenomenal experience of the redness the redness in my visual field the color the way that it looks is that only syntax well redness is definitely a property that exists only in syntax in cognitive syntax and so if you lack a cognitive syntax you're not going to have redness it's as simple as that so something like a I don't know an amphibian of some sort you would say that there has to be a cognitive syntax in order for them to have any internal phenomenal experience of color that's absolutely correct yes I mean don't forget what you know phenomenology is it's the study of experience without you know all the metaphysical bells and whistles you're looking directly at the experience and what is an experience you need you know someone who experiences something outside itself something in other words there is always that that try as spectral thing going on there and you all we're doing is trying to differentiate between the aspects of that thing experience which is once again it's like you know you use the term observation it's like attribution you're taking a property and you're applying it to an instance of the property or an object that's what everything is that's how we quantize reality in terms of attributions so let me try to I'm going to phrase something and I'll probably make a mistake but it'll give you an opportunity to further elaborate so if I were to say when we're just talking about syntax and we're talking about language we're talking about descriptions of the phenomena descriptions of the phenomena are fundamentally distinct from the experience of the phenomena so when we're talking about redness no they're not fundamentally distinct okay so can you coincide they coincide on a certain level they're sufficiently generic that they coincide with their instantiations okay so they're not you can't separate you keep on trying you keep on varying into dualism or pluralism which is binary pluralism but it's self duality it's two things coinciding in one in the same substrate now would you say that that claim itself specifically is logically certain that it must be the case that you cannot separate must be the case because you cannot define either one of those two mirates outside of the whole or to which they belong hmm so it would be would you say it's impossible to actually conceive of a phenomenological experience that doesn't come attached to some type of linguistic or syntactic content yeah basically there is no experience without linguistic or syntactic content okay experience presupposes this infrastructure that I'm talking about okay this is such an interesting claim I really have to think about it because intuitively I don't see the logical that they I think it's plausible I just don't see the logical weight behind it but of course I'm not that doesn't mean it's not there I'm just not grasp it okay so I want to talk about another this is a very related area and it's it's about logic and mathematical structure so kind of in my own part of the reason actually I started this podcast series is because I found a lot of people with PhDs making really ridiculous arguments and I thought what the heck is going on and so it kind of drew me into philosophy and there's some specific areas that I see as kind of like great intellectual cancers of the modern era and to my surprise a lot of the cancers stem from ideas in logic and mathematics and the idea that well in some circumstances you could have logical contradictions and conversation there's a there's a philosopher I think his Oxford named Graham Priest who argues that there are some true contradictions out there and I thought no of all the philosophical areas to make you can't claim that there are logical contradictions that the whole that's like you can provided that the contradiction is self-resolving yeah yeah you can it's actually in a metaphysical matrix that causes it to be self-resolving then you can have a contradiction it's only kind of in temporary of course it's only a function of perception but nevertheless there's some form of existence it will ultimately be excluded from reality however well I can it is it the case that it's a contradiction that's something like a linguistic framework that or like a linguistic error are you saying there could actually be real metaphysical a reality to some contradictory state reality is a self-resolving paradox alright it obviously it has objects which are persistent they retain the same identities things that retain the same identities and yet it changes what is it that remains the same and yet changes that is a paradox okay it either remains the same or it changes in fact reality does both okay so there you have a paradox but it self-resolves by stratifying its evolution in a certain way described within the CTNU well at any given time though it's in different states it's not that it changes like in during it at the same time so it's like you could talk about reality as being different at different times but that doesn't mean at any given time it's in a contradictory state right well it is in the sense of potential in the sense that potentials are real potentials do consist of contradictory states okay something can a quantum can be measured with if it's an electronic can be measured with spin up or spin down for example and the potential the wave function itself actually contains both of those contradictory states okay but that wave function has to collapse in order to fully enter reality the actual part of reality it's going to have to collapse to just one of those states thereby eliminating the contradiction so once again reality is a self-resolving paradox so would you say that at any given time in the most concrete reality of the things that actually exist there are no contradictory states in the CTMU we have to we have two sub languages you've got an overall language that has basically two semi languages alright and in one of these semi languages which is static alright there are no contradictory states in the other which is dynamical and actually determines the evolution of the universe contradictory states are allowed within potentials namely quantum wave functions now with the wave functions isn't that just kind of isn't that resolved in the mathematics itself so it's like the mathematics of probability you have what you can't just resolve it in the mathematics so if you somehow got to map the mathematics into reality reality has to model the mathematics and vice-versa well so for example I'm flipping a coin I say 50% of the time it'll be heads 50% of the time it'll be tails there's one way of describing that in which I could say prior to reality taking a state it's in some probability a superposition of those reasonable states you could talk that way but that doesn't actually mean that at any state it's literally in a there is a concrete I'm afraid now you've been looking at interpretations of quantum mechanics before this conversation we began we talked about that a little bit how do you think Heisenberg saw reality he didn't see it in terms of things in terms of things that you can wander around and bump into he saw it in terms of what probabilistic tendencies that's what a quantum was to Heisenberg yes I think Heisenberg was wrong I think there are other ways that preserve the kind of discreteness concreteness of reality that don't require thinking about it one semi-language of reality that's possible but then you've got to consider the other semi-language of reality these two things are in coincidence they're actually in superposition with each other the CTMU contains the blueprint for how to make those two aspects of reality work together so would you say then a kind of built into some of the you might say the philosophy of mathematics in the CTMU is more partial to the thinking of Heisenberg with like with relation to interpretations of quantum mechanics versus somebody like a Dave and Boehm or maybe a Einstein well the CTMU is designed so that you can interpret the perspectives of all of those people in it alright basically it is a universal modeling apparatus that you can take all of those perspectives and some of those perspectives are in the semi-language the static semi-language and others of those perspectives more or less correspond to the dynamic semi-language Heisenberg is in the latter Einstein and Boehm are in the former okay but one thing that we know about Einstein and Boehm is that their perspectives were essentially dualistic now we could go into the theory of relativity and I could show you how Einstein was definitely foreshadowing something like self duality but nominally speaking he was dualistic he thought that there was an independent reality that was completely independent of human observers and human cognition and this is simply not the case there is a semi-language of the CTMU in which it is the case however when we consider the dynamical semi-language that goes straight to hell and this is once again logical and it can be proven okay this is very interesting this is one of the areas I'm trying to wrap my head around some of the the claims of quantum physicists for the last century of course we're getting to very very very fundamental ideas about reality but when you say it's like not logically necessary that the CTMU is correct and takes both objectives or within let's say there's a sub-language as coinciding aspects of a single logical identity keep in mind that I've defined identity as a coupling of intention and extension so that's what we're dealing with here with the CTMU that's called self duality CTMU is a self dual theory whereas you are talking about theories that are dualistic so within the CTMU you're saying that the apparent tensions between a perspective like Einstein versus Heisenberg are in fact that's correct okay so I've got two more big questions that I want to talk to you about I want to make sure we have enough time to cover them one is again in the philosophy of mathematics so in some of the research that I've been doing I've been shocked to discover some errors in mathematical thinking so like an example would be with Newtonian calculus the concept of flexions seemed to be that for a little period of time there was maybe even a logical contradiction in understanding what infinitesimal quantities were they were zero and none there's still plenty of logical contradictions in understanding what infinitesimals are I think so as well and for somebody kind of on the outside this was shocking to me I just had the assumption that you know the history of mathematics is a history of one logical certainty being built on top of the other and when I realized that's not the case it was very unappealing and I thought well dang how deep does this rabbit hole go how much skepticism can one have in some mathematical claims okay so basically you wonder whether it is really possible to empirically induce from the fact that the past thinkers have not succeeded in resolving this inconsistency you wonder whether it is possible to actually induce a termination I guess I would put it this way when if mathematics is fundamental to the CTMU do you build kind of your mathematical structure just from scratch and say okay on these mathematical principles I have founded them and they're true or do you kind of build some of your mathematical assumptions from the work of other mathematicians basically I started out I don't know whether you're aware of this but I'm almost I have almost no higher education I have about a year of college probably and then it was abruptly terminated after that so I'm completely self-educated I work from first principles now the first the property that reality has from which I work to derive the CTMU is called intelligibility in order for something to be intelligible there needs to be an intelligible object and it needs to be patterned in such a way that it is actually intelligible to you okay so that property of intelligibility the fact that reality is intelligible to us that we can we can conceive and perceive it this leads to certain consequences those consequences are the CTMU in other words if the CTMU is false if that super tautology is false then you would not be able to conceive or perceive anything that's why I talk about the CTMU the way I do it's the way it's formulated it's the way it's built from the ground up so when you're referencing then kind of the logical or mathematical structure of reality you're not importing concepts let's say from Newton you're talking I'm importing just such concepts as I regard correct okay and of course many of Newton's concepts were spectacularly correct right infinitesimals that particular that you know a non zero quantity which is less than any finite quantity that definition of an infinitesimal raises a lot of questions that Newton did not answer right okay I know I said I had two more questions but actually this is a middle question do you actually have thoughts on infinitesimals I'm interested do you think that this is a valid concept that you can rescue or do you discard it entirely no you can definitely rescue it there's no doubt about it it's just that you've got to interpret it in the right model you know we've got this dichotomy between a continuous reality and a discrete reality John Wheeler spoke about that basically there seems to be this rift and never the twins shall meet but in reality it is possible to interpret infinitesimals and a continuous picture of reality in one and the same model with a discrete reality such as we see in quantum mechanics where one state one discernible state follows discreetly another state you see putting those two things together is what is what a theory of reality has to be all about so yes infinitesimals play a very big part in the CTMU and their interpretation okay now you can get into this if you want to research you know I mean you can take a look at pointless topology is one of the ways that the infinitesimal problem is being resolved by some mathematicians currently but even they do not have that overall model that they would need to make the concepts work that's what the CTMU is okay in the theory I'm trying to build I just I guess you could say a finitist I just figure I don't like the idea of continuity at all I can't rescue it logically here's maybe the easiest way to understand that in a sequence of events like a particle takes one state then it takes another state in other words those states are basically static entities there are open intervals between the states those are where continuity resides in the states themselves those are discrete so those sequences are countable okay in the CTMU one of those pictures is a limit of the other one okay they both exist in the same model the same overall model which has a property called conspension that's the operation by which it evolves and this an alternation between accountability and uncountability is one of its features I have a in hearing that I would love to dive more into detail specifically to flesh that concept out but I feel like that's going to take us off track and I could spend a lot of time talking about that so I want to make sure before we end that I can talk about another one of the controversial features I guess of the CTMU when I read about it I must say I've seen a lot of flippant commentary about the CTMU and almost by imbeciles your words not mine though I completely agree I stand by those words yes one of the things they mock and they treat as it's got to be self evidently wrong is because you talk about the conception of God and since they have already concluded there mustn't be any God they go oh therefore the CTMU is nonsense which is just a terrible line of reasoning but I do want to hear your thoughts about the conception of God you have kind of a proof of the existence of God but that's meaningless unless we have a definition of what that word is and kind of what it means and how it relates to humans so can you talk about God and the CTMU sure the CTMU is an identity of reality it's basically an intention extension coupling that has ontic bearing it actually explains how reality generates itself and that identity of which I just spoke is God you've read the bible right I'm sure you're familiar with John 1 not off the top of my head but yeah grew up evangelical in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God right right yes it's a description of logos that's basically what we're talking about here the CTMU is logos and logos is God so you know cutting to the chase that's basically what it's all about we can get we can treat the identity of reality as God and then we can derive its properties now the question then arises are these properties the same as those which are usually cited as properties of God in various definitions of God existing in various religions and the answer is yes we can actually derive those properties within the system now going into it when you were working on this did you have a background in religious thinking or in theology did you think there's a lot of truth to the traditional conceptions of God I wonder if I can find it in the theory or was it just you arrived at this totally independently and then saw oh wow look these theologians have been kind of describing the same thing for a few thousand years well it's just that I saw that an identity of reality was necessary logically necessary in order for reality to be intelligible or perceptible and I wondered to what extent you could derive from this identity properties that could then be related to a non-struct called God and I found that it was absolutely possible to derive God from this identity so when you say the word God and obviously there's similarity with how theologians talk about it does it also come with more theological baggage there's a lot of stories and other stories in the Bible and other various holy books do you think there are truth to those do you have a denomination do you think that God has a particular name and or do you just kind of leave it at the philosophical level of identity God is the identity of reality or to put it another way God is ultimate reality define him any other way and basically you are out of sync with the way any religion defines God so basically what we're looking for is a definition of God which we're striving for is a definition of God that satisfies all religions because it possesses properties that are common and that's what this definition of God that I'm talking about is so could we summarize just that God is literally everything yes we can that is valid yes okay God is a lot else and everything has certain properties that are not widely recognized and when we recognize those properties then we realize where all of this religious stuff comes from I see okay well that is an excellent note to end on I really appreciate your time Chris this has been a really fantastic conversation well thanks for the opportunity Steve